PACE - dDec 2018

DECEMBER 2018/JANUARY 2019 | VOL.71 NO.6 | Est. 1953

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INSIDE PACE

Collaboration

Women in Industry

Sensors

Bringing industry and academia together

Communications is key in engineering

Manufacturing individualism

WHY 3D PRINTING AND AUSTRALIA’S MANUFACTURING FUTURE ARE INSEPARABLE EXCLUSIVE:

Handy hints when looking at renewables as part of your energy strategy

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CONTENTS

Managing Director: John Murphy Publisher: Christine Clancy Managing Editor: Syed Shah Editor: Mike Wheeler Ph:(02) 9439 7227 mike.wheeler@primecreative.com.au

IN THIS ISSUE

Journalist: Miri Schroeter Ph: (02) 9439 7227 miri.schroeter@primecreative.com.au Sales/Advertising: Ashwin Shekar Ph: 0414 217 190 ashwin.shekar@primecreative.com.au Production Coordinator: Natasha Shekar Ph: (02) 9439 7227 natasha.shekar@primecreative.com.au

28

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26 Editor’s Comment 4 News 6

A funding boost in 3D printing is growing manufacturing in Australia Industrial Automation 14

An industry specialist from Weidmuller discusses staying relevant in a competitive environment Automation 16

Automation is heading into a new phase of growth Energy Efficiency 18

Phoenix Contact helps companies combat the technical difficulties of sourcing renewable energy Industrial Spraying 20

© Copyright Prime Creative Media, 2018

Process Finishing Solutions offers manufacturers industrial spraying products and services

Articles All articles submitted for publication become the property of the publisher. The Editor reserves the right to adjust any article to conform with the magazine format.

Infrastructure 22

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An Australian construction specialist has expanded its portfolio to include a waste and water division

Sydney Office Suite 303, 1-9 Chandos Street, Saint Leonards, NSW 2065, Australia

Sensors 24

Proximity sensors can meet all requirements Energy Management 26

Innovation 12

Copyright PACE is owned by Prime Creative Media and published by John Murphy. All material in PACE is copyright and no part may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic or mechanical including information and retrieval systems) without written permission of the publisher. The Editor welcomes contributions but reserves the right to accept or reject any material. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information, Prime Creative Media will not accept responsibility for errors or omissions or for any consequences arising from reliance on information published.

The opinions expressed in PACE are not necessarily the opinions of, or endorsed by the publisher unless otherwise stated.

24

An overview of how to overcome limitations of industrial solar systems Industry Collaboration 28

A UTS Tech Lab brings industry and academia together Cybersecurity 30

Cybersecurity experts from around the globe share their insights on how companies can be better protected from cyber-attacks Drives 32

SEW Eurodrive helps improve factory efficiency with a new drive Women in Industry 34

Professor in Environmental Engineering Julia Lamborn at Monash University.

New Products 36

ON THE COVER

Additive manufacturing starting to take centre stage DECEMBER 2018/JANUARY 2019 | VOL.71 NO.6 | Est. 1953

INSIDE PACE

Collaboration

Women in Industry

Sensors

Bringing industry and academia together

Julia Lamborn: keeping to the basics

Manufacturing individualism

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28 Dingley Ave Dandenong VIC 3175 WHY 3D PRINTING AND AUSTRALIA’S MANUFACTURING FUTURE ARE INSEPARABLE EXCLUSIVE:

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing as it is commonly called, could open up a whole lot of new opportunities for the manufacturing industry. While there has been a lot of talk about it in terms of potential, there are those in academia who believe that it is about to be reached in terms of how it can help industry, especially

SMEs. Our cover story speaks to Dr Simon Ringer whose faculty at the University of Sydney, is literally at the cutting edge of the technology. It’s interesting to see how Ringer sees the technology will change the landscape and how its emergence could have a profound effect on manufacturing in Australia.

Handy hints when looking at renewables as part of your energy strategy

DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 3

COMMENT

EDITOR’S MESSAGE

Mike Wheeler Editor

Opportunities abound with 3D printing

ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING, or 3D printing as it is commonly known, is set to become a boon for some in the manufacturing industry.

Professor Simon Ringer, who is the academic director of the University of Sydney’s Core Research Facilities compares 3D printing to welding – the latter being a technology he believes was a game changer when it came onto the manufacturing/ construction scene. He sees additive manufacturing in the same vein.

Earlier this year, the university received a grant of $3 million via the AusMURI programme that connects Australian and American researchers together, in this case, in the discipline of additive manufacturing.

4 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

There are many reasons Ringer is excited about the grant. It gives the opportunity for budding engineer graduates who want to do a PhD on the subject to explore their ideas further. This is also the case for materials scientists, engineers, research assistants and post-doctoral research fellows, who want to take the technology as far as it can go. But the really exciting part for Ringer, is the potential long-term effect it will have on the engineering and manufacturing sectors in two areas – wastage (or lack thereof) and a new industrial sector, micro manufacturing.

He believes 3D printing will lead to a slew of 10s if not 100s of little manufacturing enterprises throughout Australia that can make

bespoke products that have very short production runs. These products will not only be affordable to make, but also help sustain a raft of small businesses in this space.

Renewable energy has had its fair share of column space in many newspapers, magazines and websites. Most of the stories have been positive due to the clean nature of its generation. However, solar and wind power have their drawbacks when it comes to making them part of your energy solution. With that in mind, SAGE Automation has put together an interesting piece on how putting a little bit of thought into such a strategy is a good idea because unforeseen circumstances might arise that will affect your power supply.

Finally, there is a piece about how Sydney’s UTS is trying to increase cooperation between industry and academia by opening its $65 million Tech Lab. It has been designed so that UTS academics and researchers can work with both industry and government to invent solutions for the world of tomorrow. As well as having experts in various fields of technology, the Tech Lab hopes to generate good will and a lot of ideas between two aspects of Australian enterprise that traditionally haven’t always seen eye to eye. The end result for those in charge of the facility is Australia not only keeping up with the latest technologies, but leading the way with the likes of Germany, the US and Singapore. PACE

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NEWS

Winners announced for Australia’s first bioenergy awards

F

our innovative bioenergy projects and the Premier of Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk, have been awarded top honours at the inaugural Bioenergy Innovation Awards Dinner held at the State Library of Queensland.

The awards showcase Australia’s ambition in developing innovative bio-based alternatives for heat, power and liquid fuels and how these projects are taking steps towards seeing the $3.5 to $5 billion investment potential of the sector.

Shahana McKenzie, Bioenergy Australia CEO, said, “Bioenergy is the subject of considerable interest and investment world-wide, due to its enormous potential to reduce carbon emissions and drive a more sustainable energy future.”

The awards are recognition for the breadth and scope of the bioenergy project work being undertaken across Australia.”

McKenzie was delighted Premier Palaszczuk was selected for the Government Leadership Award, “I commend Premier Palaszczuk on her state-leading policy vision and commitment to the bioenergy industry that we know will create thousands of jobs and attract billions in new investment, particularly across regional Australia – Queensland is set to reap a lot of those benefits.”

The awarded projects challenge the status quo of the energy sector, build on the early pioneering work and showcase the potential for Australia to be a world-class bioenergy player.”

Winners included: Government Leadership Award – Premier of Queensland Annastacia Palaszczuk MP Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s leadership and commitment to Australia’s bio-economy received top accolades.

Under the Premier’s leadership, a 6 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

Community Leadership Award – Pyrenees Shire Council (VIC) Pyrenees Shire Council in regional Victoria was recognised for its large-scale collaborative project that focussed on converting straw and straw pellets to energy. “The power of collaborative enthusiasm and effort to get a community of stakeholders to not only plan together, but to get a project up and running was impressive,” said McKenzie. This project follows on from the successful local installation of a wood chip heating system at the Beaufort hospital replacing liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) . The group is now looking at opportunities to develop a straw-based bioenergy plant to power Skipton hospital.

has received top honours in the large-scale bioenergy category. Perthbased, Biogass Renewables, has commissioned a plant that will take between 35,000 and 50,000 tonnes per annum of food waste, which is capable of producing between 2.4MW-2.6MW of energy. “Their innovative application of anaerobic digestion is a major advancement for the Australian market. We look forward to seeing their ambitions come to fruition in other locations around Australia in the years to come,” said McKenzie.

Research Leadership Award Australian Biomass for Bioenergy Assessment A large-scale national collaboration of states, industry and universities has created the platform the Australian Biomass for Bioenergy Assessment, to enable better links between biomass suppliers and end users.

The platform will support local businesses to get more value from organic material. “This landmark project has resulted with this tool securing itself as a global leader in the spatial mapping of the availability and location of biomass,” said McKenzie. “The datasets are being used by governments, universities and industry in developing the bioenergy industry and informing and driving policy direction.”

Small-Scale Bioenergy Innovation Award – Meredith Dairy (VIC) Meredith Dairy was given the gong for its successful demonstration of a holistic, integrated solution at a small scale. Their project replaced their gas boiler unit with a boiler fuelled by sustainably sourced biomass materials using wood chips. “The project typified their already known commitment to sustainability,” said McKenzie.

Partners include the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), University of the Sunshine Coast, Sustainability Victoria, Renewables SA, Queensland University of Technology, Department of State Growth, Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation, Department of Primary Industries and the Department of Agriculture and Food (WA). PACE

The Bioenergy Innovation Awards showcase Australia’s want to develop bio-based alternative energies.

10-year Roadmap and Action Plan (The Plan) has been developed by the Queensland Government to support the growth of Queensland’s bio-economy showing how the state could be established as a premium location. The Plan has already identified 15 current projects that represent a potential investment of around $1.4 billion and 2,500 new jobs in rural and regional communities if they progress as planned. “The integrated approach is paving the way for Australia to develop a sustainable, exportoriented industrial biotechnology and bioproducts sector by 2026. The plan shows a pathway that recognises Queensland’s mix of natural resources, skilled workforces, worldclass research and development and supporting supply chain industries,” said McKenzie.

Large Scale Bioenergy Innovation Award – Biogas Renewables (WA) A first of its kind project for Australia that converts food waste to energy

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NEWS

Light shines on new pathway for quantum technology

I

n a world-first demonstration of topologically protected biphoton states, physicist Andrea BlancoRedondo has opened up a pathway to use light to develop a new type of qubit, the building blocks for quantum computers.

Scientists in Australia have for the first time demonstrated the protection of correlated states between paired photons – packets of light energy – using the intriguing physical concept of topology. This experimental breakthrough opens a pathway to build a new type of quantum bit, the building blocks for quantum computers.

The research, developed in close collaboration with Israeli colleagues at Technion, is published in the journal, Science, a recognition of the foundational importance of this work.

“We can now propose a pathway to build robust entangled states for logic gates using protected pairs of photons,” said lead author Blanco-Redondo at the University of Sydney Nano Institute.

Logic gates are the switches needed to operate algorithms written for quantum computers. Classical computational switches are in simple binary forms of zero or one.

Quantum switches exist in a state of ‘superposition’ that combine zero and one.

Protecting quantum information long enough so that quantum machines can perform useful calculations is one of the biggest challenges in modern physics. Useful quantum computers will require millions or billions of qubits to process information. So far, the best experimental devices have about 20 qubits.

To unleash the potential of quantum technology, scientists need to find a way to protect the entangled superposition of quantum bits – or qubits – at the nanoscale. Attempts to achieve this using superconductors and trapped ions have shown promise, but they are highly susceptible to electromagnetic interference, making them devilishly difficult to 8 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

scale up into useful machines.

The use of photons – packets of light energy – rather than electrons has been one proposed alternative upon which to build logic gates that can calculate quantum algorithms.

Photons, unlike electrons, are well isolated from the thermal and electromagnetic environment. However, scaling quantum devices based on photonic qubits has been limited due to scattering loss and other errors; until now.

“What we have done is develop a novel lattice structure of silicon nanowires, creating a particular symmetry that provides unusual robustness to the photons’ correlation.

The symmetry both helps create and guide these correlated states, known as ‘edge modes’,” said Blanco-Redondo, the Messel Research Fellow in the School of Physics.

“This robustness stems from the underlying topology, a global property of the lattice that remains unchanged against disorder.”

The correlation this produces is needed to build entangled states for quantum gates.

Channels, or waveguides, made using silicon nanowires just 500 nanometres wide, were lined up in pairs with a deliberate defect in symmetry through the middle, creating two lattice structures with different topologies and an intervening ‘edge’.

This topology allows for the creation of special modes in which the photons can pair up – called ‘edge modes’.

These modes allow information carried by the paired photons to be transported in a robust fashion that otherwise would have been scattered and lost across a uniform lattice.

Blanco-Redondo designed and performed the experiment in the Sydney Nanoscience Hub with Dr Bryn Bell, previously at the University of Sydney and now at the University of Oxford.

The photons were created by highintensity, ultra-short laser pulses, the same underlying technology for which

Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou were awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.

This research is the latest in the flourishing of discoveries in the past decade on topological states of matter.

These topological features offer protection for classical and quantum information in fields as diverse as electromagnetism, condensed matter, acoustics and cold atoms.

Microsoft Quantum Laboratories, including the one in Sydney, are pursuing the development of electron-based qubits where quantum information is topologically protected via the knotting of quasiparticles known as Majorana fermions.

This is a bit like braiding half electron states induced through the interaction of superconductors and semiconducting metals.

Topologically protected states have previously been demonstrated for single photons.

However, Blanco-Redondo said: “Quantum information systems will rely on multiphoton states, highlighting the importance of this discovery for further development.”

She said the next step will be to improve protection of the photon entanglement to create robust, scalable quantum logic gates.

Professor Stephen Bartlett, a theoretical quantum physicist at Sydney Nano who is unconnected to the study, said: “Dr Blanco-Redondo’s result is exciting at a fundamental level because it shows the existence of protected modes attached to the boundary of a topologically ordered material.

“What it means for quantum computing is unclear as it is still early days. But the hope is that the protection offered by these edge modes could be used to protect photons from the types of noise that are problematic for quantum applications.”

The paper was co-written with Dr Bryn Bell; the Director of Sydney Nano, Professor Ben Eggleton; and Dr Dikla Oren and Professor Mordechai Segev at Technion in Haifa, Israel.

This work was supported by the University of Sydney and the Technion collaborative photonics research project funded by the Technion Society of Australia (NSW) and the NSW Department of Industry. PACE

Protecting quantum information long enough so that quantum machines can perform useful calculations is one of the biggest challenges in modern physics.

NEWS

Grid scale battery initiative powers up in Gannawarra

T

he Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has jointly announced that the second of two grid scale batteries funded with the Victorian government has been completed in Gannawarra.

The 25 MW/50 MWh Gannawarra Energy Storage System (GESS) began exporting electricity to the grid in October and will be fully commissioned in time for summer.

The battery is co-located at the 60 MW Gannawarra Solar Farm near Kerang in North Western Victoria.

In March, on behalf of the Australian government, ARENA

committed $25 million to two gridconnected, utility-scale batteries, matching the $25 million committed by the Victorian government as part of its $50 million energy storage initiative.

Together with the Ballarat battery, these two grid scale batteries will help to ease constraints on transmission lines and balance the grid with higher shares of renewable energy.

Australian renewable energy company Edify Energy oversaw the development and construction of the project in a joint venture with Wirsol Energy. GESS uses Tesla’s lithium ion battery technology.

EnergyAustralia will operate GESS in addition to a long-term offtake agreement to buy all the electricity generated from the co-located Gannawarra Solar Farm.

EnergyAustralia is also the operator of the Ballarat battery now registered and working.

GESS is Australia’s largest battery to be integrated with a solar farm, and will be among the largest solar and battery facilities in the world – with the ability to provide solar energy at night to the grid.

ARENA CEO Darren Miller said the project shows the growing importance of batteries providing

stability to the grid, and was an example of retrofitting a solar farm with a battery.

“Grid-scale batteries have the ability to provide rapid response injections of power and provide back-up power when needed.

“Integrating with the local solar farm provides potential for solar energy to be stored and used at night, helping to deliver secure and reliable electricity when it is needed.” Miller said.

“We congratulate the consortium behind the GESS project and look forward to it providing valuable system security services to Victoria’s grid this summer,” he said. PACE

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NEWS

Cloud-based systems and collaborative technologies key to school success

T

he use of the latest technology is paramount in ensuring Australia’s education sector continues to meet the learning needs of students, education technology experts say.

Speaking at a round-table discussion in Sydney on October 30, Jamie Davidson, ANZ regional sales manager at Jamf, said a recent survey conducted by Westpac indicated that 75 per cent of new jobs will require some STEM skill – showing the importance of technology in all schools.

The panel focused on technology trends and cyber-security in Australia’s schools, universities and the vocational education sector.

Davidson said the use of mobile technology to deliver rich, interactive learning experiences is helping schools and higher education providers differentiate themselves and improve learning outcomes for students.

“If we want more Australians to achieve this success, STEM plays a big role in encouraging students to develop skills that they need to leap forward and to move the nation forward in this technology sector.

“Just purchasing iPads for classes is not going to cut it. Schools need to deploy those iPads with the content, apps and features that best support teachers to run their lessons,” said Davidson.

Frost and Sullivan Australia managing director, Mark Dougan, said education-technology is a huge sector, but often it falls off the radar.

“We are looking at a client base for edu-tech producers of about 15,000 institutions Australia-wide,” he said.

Changes in the way education providers can use technology include reducing dropout rates and improving student engagement, said Dougan.

10 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

Institutions are increasingly using ICT as a differentiator in a market that’s competitive and becoming even more so, he said.

“Institutions are investing in a range of applications, from learning management and student management systems through to business applications such as CRM and payroll, which are customised to suit the unique requirements of the sector.”

Students’ requests are also changing as there is growth in online courses, learning management systems and virtual reality, he said.

“Students are increasingly demanding more customised courses.”

Tribal Group Australian managing director Peter Croft said frontline spending priorities often result in ICT projects being deferred, despite their potential to deliver efficiency gains.

But, schools need to update their technology use, including using cloud systems, he said.

“We’re finally seeing growing awareness among schools that going to the cloud offers significant advantages – doing so can reduce operational costs and remove the complications associated with managing platforms and systems internally.

“Schools need to deliver not just education outcomes they need to deliver financial outcomes,” said Croft.

“Schools do run as businesses and like any business they have an interest in containing costs, operating as efficiently as they can and delivering value for money to parents and students.

“They need to make sure they are providing a quality system and quality outcomes for students,” he said.

With cloud systems, schools can benefit from data analytics, said Croft.

Education technology is a huge sector, but often falls off the radar.

“One of the drivers we see is organisations wanting to get data analytics to be more predictive about how they can change their offer and change their course content.”

Ricoh digital automation strategy and portfolio manager, Damian Aivaliotis, said activity based learning and group work are a feature of the higher education environment and technologies, which make it easier for students and educators to connect and collaborate with one another.

“Online and distance learning have become increasingly popular and need to be underpinned by workflow technologies that offer students a rich learning experience, irrespective of

their location,” said Aivaliotis.

WatchGuard Technologies ANZ regional director, Mark Sinclair, said with hacking and phishing on the rise, schools need to take a rigorous approach to threats, be vigilant against attacks and privacy breaches and use tools and technologies strategically.

There are a lot of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ systems in education, but the risk of threats increases as students bring devices to school, he said.

Schools need to be aware of threats from the outside, but also coming from systems internally, said Sinclair. PACE

NEWS

How to speed up local networks

A

coustic noise in chips used to be a nuisance. Now scientists at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have developed a technique to put it to use in receivers of information in fibre-optic networks.

It used to be known as the information superhighway – the fibre-optic infrastructure on which gigabytes and petabytes of data whizz around the world at (nearly) the speed of light. And like any highway system, increased traffic has created slowdowns, especially at the junctions where data jumps on or off the system. Local and access networks are not as fast as they could be. This is because increasingly complex digital signal processing and Projekt1‘local 26.06.18 08:41 Seite 1 laser-based oscillator’ systems are needed to unpack the photonic,

or optical, information and transfer it into the electronic information that computers can process.

Now, scientists at the University of Sydney have, for the first time, developed a chip-based information recovery technique that eliminates the need for a separate laser-based local oscillator and complex digital signal processing system.

“Our technique uses the interaction of photons and acoustic waves to enable an increase in signal capacity and therefore speed,” said Dr Elias Giacoumidis, joint lead author of a new study. “This allows for the successful extraction and regeneration of the signal for electronic processing at very high speed.”

The incoming photonic signal is processed in a filter on a chip made

from a glass known as chalcogenide.

This material has acoustic properties that allows a photonic pulse to ‘capture’ the incoming information and transport it on the chip to be processed into electronic information. This removes the need for complicated laser oscillators and complex digital signal processing.

“This will increase processing speed by microseconds, reducing latency,” said Amol Choudhary from the University of Sydney Nano Institute and School of Physics.

“It will make a huge difference in high-speed services, such as the financial sector and emerging e-health applications.”

The photonic-acoustic interaction harnesses what is known as stimulated Brillouin scattering, an effect used by the Sydney team

to develop photonic chips for information processing.

“Our demonstration device using stimulated Brillouin scattering has produced a record-breaking narrowband of about 265MH bandwidth for carrier signal extraction and regeneration. This narrow bandwidth increases the overall spectral efficiency and therefore overall capacity of the system,” Choudhary said.

Group research leader and director of Sydney Nano, Ben Eggleton, said: “The fact that this system is lower in complexity and includes extraction speedup means it has huge potential benefit in a range of local and access systems such as metropolitan 5G networks, financial trading, cloud computing and the Internet-of-Things.” PACE

DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 11

INNOVATION

3D printing to boost Australian manufacturing capabilities Additive manufacturing/3D printing in Australia has received a boost thanks to a grant handed out by the United States. Mike Wheeler explains.

J

ust over 37 years ago, 31-year-old Japanese lawyer, Dr Hideo Kodama from the Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute, patented two additive methods that allowed the fabrication of 3D plastic models. He also utilised the properties of photo-hardening thermoset polymers, where the UV exposure area is controlled by a scanning fibre transmitter or a mask pattern.

Fast forward to 2018 and the technology has moved into dimensions that not even Kodama could have imagined – from being able to ‘print’ a firearm capable of firing bullets through to manufacturing parts that are used to fit out aircraft.

Australia’s need to get on board the 3D printing/additive manufacturing bandwagon has been given a boost with a $3 million grant over three years to the University of Sydney. There is also potential for a further two-year renewal phase,

for the university to lead Australia’s participation in the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), which is administered by the US Department of Defense.

Like a lot of technologies, additive manufacturing has the potential to take off, and take off big. And how big can it get? As big as you want to get according to Professor Simon Ringer, academic director of the University of Sydney’s Core Research Facilities.

Ringer was integral in getting the grant money over the line, and is not only excited for Australia, but for the scope the technology has over the next decade.

“Think about 3D printing like a weld,” said Ringer. “Welding has changed society. There are papers I have seen showing economic analysis that correlate the capacity of welding science and technology with a country and its GDP per capita – countries that have got that capability to get things done. Welding is really

The University of Sydney recieved a funding boost to help Australia’s 3D printing capabilities.

12 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

complex. We all know that welding can go wrong and that we have failures along the welds and bad things happen. But we all know, and we’ve all seen that welding helps with building amazing structures that we couldn’t have made – or even though about – unless welding was available. And so welding creates so many opportunities for us to build things in an efficient and funky way. This is where we are heading with additive manufacturing.

A game changer.

“What we are doing here is a bit like welding. We are taking particles and we’re doing these welds, but it’s not just one weld, its hundreds, its thousands of welding cycles we’re putting in there. Therefore, these materials are experiencing residual stresses, thermal cycles we don’t normally see them experience. That is why we need research to see what is what.”

The money is going to be spent on the ground to build up the academic and industry capacity in additive manufacturing, said Ringer.

“We’re on the hunt for some very ambitious, bright engineering students who would want to do PhDs,” he said. “We’re on the hunt for materials scientists and engineers who want to do PhDs, and post-doctoral research fellows, and research assistants and stuff. We are at that point now of starting to create Australia’s new work force – the new expertise.”

How does an Australian academic institution marry with its American counterparts to gain funding to take advantage of one of the most promising pieces of technology that could take Australian manufacturing to the next level?

“Australia had a scheme called AusMURI, because we saw what the US folk were doing with the MURI scheme,” said Ringer. “We noticed

there was a huge programme brewing in the US with different academic institutions. These institutions talk to each other, so we said, ‘let’s get in on that and let’s sync up our capability developments’. The call went out to people like me and my colleagues. We thought, ‘if we can hitch our wagon to a MURI application in the US, then we can have an AusMURI application, which is like a companion application to that, and it should be threaded and be congruent and collaborative with that programme’.”

And that was how they got the funding. The university got Australian money and the US universities obtained US money. Ringer said they got the funding because the body who was responsible for giving the grant outright stated that Ringer’s proposal got its nose over the line because of the integration of the Australian capability with the American’s. The body said that the international aspect gave the application a little sparkle. It was great for Ringer and his colleagues, because the American folks were there and they were thinking ‘yeah, it was really great to have you Australians in on this bid because you helped us get over the line, too’.

But if you really want to see Ringer excited and animated about the funding and what it can do, start talking about the types of materials that can now be used. Especially when it comes to using the elements on the periodic table. Ringer believes we are in an era where scientists are going to be driven to discover more element combinations than ever – something that will benefit adherents of additive manufacturing.

“When you go to the periodic table, people think we know pretty much all that we need to know about all the elements?” he said. “But, if we think about the binary combinations of all

INNOVATION

Scientists could discover more element combinations with 3D printing/additive manufacturing. the elements in the periodic table, funnily enough we haven’t explored them all – many but not all. If I say I want to make a binary or alloy of two things, I’m going to one of each elements – how many combos have we actually explored of the binaries where we take two out. We actually haven’t done them all. Now, what if I add the possibilty of ternary (three) elements of the periodic table into the equation?

“What about all of the ternaries on the periodic table. We’ve done a tiny slice of all space – the quaternary, the quinary – the six, the seven, the eight.

“We have not even touched on it. This technology will invite us to revisit all of those questions. We land on materials that work and then we incrementally develop them and so on. This almost sends us back to the periodic table and explores what can really be done with these things. It’s extremely exciting from an engineering view point.”

There are two other aspects of this technology that need to be addressed – both that will have a positive effect on the economy – wastage and the kind

of products that will be produced on a micro and mass scale.

“Waste is a big issue,” he said.

“Take titanium for example, which is used in TI64 – a well-known aerospace alloy and bio implant alloy.

Typically, we’re making those in a lathe. Titanium is pretty expensive and you look at the final part you have made and then you look on the ground. You get a broom out because you have started out with a section of a billet, and most of the billet is on the floor in shavings. There’s a tiny bit here that ends up being the final component. In the case of additive manufacturing, the powders go in, the sintering occurs, and you’ve got a near net funnel shaped product. There are no shavings on the floor and you have near zero loss. That’s very attractive and that’s very disruptive. This is doing good things in the terms of the manufacture.”

And smaller manufacturers doing bespoke products for consumers?

Surely, when it comes to economies of scale doing such things might not be a profitable enterprise and not

worth doing in the long run?

“The kind of designs you can make in 3D metal printing are literally limited by our imagination,” said Ringer. “There is disruption about low volumes being okay and manufacturers will be able to do bespoke manufacturing and that is exciting.

Especially in Australia. You can do hi-tech, low-volume stuff and keep your shirt. There will be a lot of little factories opening up. Even to the point where you could have a high-end, $3 million metal 3D printer and you can do your jobs from home, but rent the printer for an hour to punch out a few jobs and get Amazon to deliver it to you.

“There were things that were entirely impossible – like double re-entry angles for example – that will now be possible. If you were trying to make these items with a mill or lathe, it was almost impossible. Now, if you can draw it, you can make it.”

And the future for Australian manufacturing. If Ringer was looking into a crystal ball, what would be the end game for one of the

country’s primary industries?

“Ten years from now, I would say this: ‘Many engineers would look back and say after WWII Australia had a great capability in manufacturing’,” he said. “‘We really did. In the decades after WWII, our capability diminished but with one thing and another we got into the early part of the 21st century and some disruptions happened and all of a sudden with this additive manufacturing disruption Australia’s time came again. Australia was able to build outstanding world-class manufacturing capability because we were positioned well to harness this disruption’. That’s what I see. “‘And so when you go into the future western suburbs of Sydney we’ll see global supply chains that are done in manufacturing in Sydney and other parts of Australia’. I would also say this: ‘the Australian academic community – people like myself, took our responsibility to take Australia, as did policy makers at state and federal level and the governments, to position Australia to be able to capture this special opportunity’.” PACE DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 13

INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION

Consulting an important part of connectivity equation Mike Wheeler talks to Rafael Koenig, managing director of industrial connectivity specialist Weidmuller, about the company’s approach in a competitive industry.

S

tarting out as a textile factory in Chemnitz, eastern Germany in 1850, Weidmuller reinvented itself in the 1940s as a manufacturer of Staffel terminal blocks. When Germany was divided after World War II, the company re-established itself in Detmold, then West Connectivity in automation is going to be important over the next few years.

14 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

Germany in 1948. There, it became a specialist in industrial connectivity, and, 70 years later, now employs more than 4,500 people and has a turnover of $1.2 billion. Not bad for a company that started out selling buttons over 160 years ago.

Weidmuller Australia is run by Rafael Koenig, an affable expatriate

from Germany who made Sydney home in the late 90s. Koenig knows that it can be an uphill battle taking on the big players in the automation and process control market but he also has enough self-belief in Weidmuller that it is building momentum in what can sometimes be a crowded market.

Koenig also believes that there are enough points of difference between Weidmuller and the competition that his company can more than hold its own.

“In today’s technical world, it is not just enough to sell components,” said managing director Koenig. “We try to partner up with customers

INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION

because we want to give them the value add component of our business.

Today’s user expects technology solutions that help them solve their challenges and problems while improving their business outcomes.”

One example is the comprehensive connectivity program that Weidmuller has to offer. This spans a large portfolio but starts with the humble DIN rail terminal block, which comes in different variations – spring cage, traditional screw cage, and the push-in block series. But it is the aforementioned added value component where Koenig believes Weidmuller can make inroads.

“When we went to a recent conference, we did a comparison of how quickly we could get one of our cabinets wired up,” he said. “That made us think, ‘how can we add value?’ ‘How easy is it to use them?’

‘How much time can you save?’

‘How can you optimise that space in the cabinet?’ and ‘How can you mix and match products so they fit together?’”

extra step for clients, especially for those that are unsure on how the connectivity should work with their set up.

“One thing that we are really good at is what we call connectivity consulting,” said Koenig. “By consulting, the aim is to partner with our customers in order to optimise their supply chain, how they use their cabinet space and the functionality of their products.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be us but it is all about the concept and what the customer wants to solve. We take it a step further and said, ‘maybe we can help you optimise your panel layout, and if you want, we can also assemble your solution for you’. We tell them, due to our core expertise in connectivity, it’s the best way to utilise a control cabinet and how we can assist in the building process.

For us this is the best way to differentiate us from other suppliers in Australia.”

It is also important to listen to what the customer wants when

“In today’s technical world, it is not just enough to sell components... We try to partner up with customers because we want to give them the value add component of our business. Today’s user expects technology solutions that help them solve their challenges and problems while improving their business outcomes.”

Another perspective that Koenig said needs considering is this: How secure is an investment if Weidmuller products are used? Will the technology still be around in a couple of years? How do the products match with the big topics that the industry is facing, such as digitalisation, Industry 4.0 and connectivity to the cloud?

“For every step in between there is a solution with Weidmuller,” said Koenig. “We are there to help identify problems that a customer has. Not only with a particular product and their application, but also with helping find a solution.”

He also said not to underestimate the importance of going that

doing the consulting. Koenig believes it is Weidmuller’s job to give people choices, but it has to be in close consultation.

“The customer always has the last word,” he said. “Like any other service provider, we do factory approval tests, but data technical specifications are set by the customer.

Before we start to put anything together we will seek approval and provide detailed drawings and documentation of what we deliver.

We say, ‘this is our solution. Is this what you want?’ You just can’t go ahead and build something and then tell the customer that this is what they need. Unfortunately, this is still the way some people operate.”

“We want to do what the customer wants, but we also want to get our knowledge and say, ‘we have some areas where we can optimise what you are doing’, and then try to advise them accordingly... We try and use our knowledge to improve what the customers are doing.

We see our service as a specialist in the connectivity arena and how customers can make the most of the space that they have in their cabinets.”

And there is a fine line between a customer’s demands and offering sound advice, which is why it is important to not only know what you are talking about, but also know that the end-game is the best possible outcome for the client.

“We want to do what the customer wants, but we also want to get our knowledge and say, ‘we have some areas where we can optimise what you are doing’, and then try to advise them accordingly,” he said.

“We try and use our knowledge to improve what the customers are doing. We see our service as a specialist in the connectivity arena and how customers can make the most of the space that they have in their cabinets.”

Finally, when it comes to connectivity, other key ingredients in the Weidmuller formula are the ease of use of its push-in products and speed of use.

“Push-in technology takes about a third of the time compared to using screw terminals, and the push-in technology is a preparation to populate and wire up cabinets that are fully robotic and automatic,” said Koenig. “It used to be a trend you’d see in Europe where you’d have large cabinet builders and control cabinet builders that work on the same designs over and over again. That does not apply that much to the Australian market yet, but if you are a serious machine builder, they would standardise on one cabinet and the goal is to fully automate and wire up these cabinets.

So the robotics that are needed also require a form of connection technology that is simple and

convenient and that is the push-in technology. It is still a work in progress.”

With automation ramping up in the manufacturing sector, connectivity is going to be an important part of the equation over the next decade. Koenig believes that Weidmuller is one company that can not only provide the products to help run plant and machinery, but also has the expertise to give the best advice possible.

Apart from the connectivity solutions, Weidmuller has in recent years expanded its automation technology portfolio and has identified digitalisation as a critical strategic area.

“The future direction of companies like Weidmueller will see a significant build up in expertise for digitalisation, communication technologies as well as software capabilities,” said Koenig. “Our activities in industrial analytics is one example that demonstrates the progress of our business towards becoming a technology partner not just for connectivity.

“Our strong relationship and proximity to our customers is key to our success in Australia and we take particular pride in the quality of the distribution partner network that we are part of. This network allows us to work shoulder to shoulder with other leading global brands.

We see our role in supporting our channel partners through our Weidmueller experts and, together with them, make our customer more competitive in a world that sees massive changes in our industry.” PACE DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 15

AUTOMATION

EtherCAT at cutting edge of new technology upgrades in automation With automation now heading into a new phase of growth due to Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT), speed is a key ingredient. Having a fieldbus system that can keep up is essential. PACE explains.

B

eckhoff spent the last two weeks in October travelling around Australia and New Zealand with a roadshow explaining how its EtherCAT fieldbus system fits into the ever-changing world of industrial automation.

On hand was the EtherCAT Technology Group’s (ETG) executive director Martin Rostan, who flew in from Germany to take the reins of the presentations.

Rostan is aware that Ethernet technology is moving into a new phase as the likes of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 require better technologies that need to communicate with each other, at 16 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

speed, and be flexible enough to meet the varying criteria of many different manufacturing enterprises.

“Industry 4.0 is an initiative by the German Government with the overall goal of bringing manufacturing back to Germany,” said Rostan.

“Manufacturing has gone east – Southeast Asia and China. [Chinese company] Foxconn makes the iPhone while 99 per cent of the world’s motherboards are coming out of China or Taiwan. The goal of Industry 4.0 is to make production more flexible, dynamic and transparent, with the ability to do smaller lot sizes with a more quality and in a low-cost way.

So, we can make customised products

from which makes them uneconomic to produce in Asia due to distance. This is the leverage on how to get production to a high-wage country like Germany.

“It can be seen as a convergence of automation and IT and bringing both worlds together. From our point of view, there is a lot of communication with Industry 4.0 and the IoT and that is the main driving factor,” said Rostan.

“Communications is a prerequisite for bringing this all together. EtherCAT is the fieldbus that has outstanding real-time capabilities with the OPC UA [Open Platform Communications – Unified Architecture] and is a good enhancement as a complementary technology.”

Rostan sees both technologies complementing each other and not competitors. That is why Beckhoff entered into a MoU with the OPC Foundation and both organisations agreed that they won’t compete but cooperate and will come up with common interfaces, on which they are currently working.

“If we look at the communication requirements of IoT and Industry 4.0, we need the short cycle times determined within the machine control layout,” said Rostan. “We need the cyclic data transfer on the horizontal level and we need the connectivity towards SCADA systems and cloudbased technology. And the associated

AUTOMATION

Helping to put you in Control

LogBox Connect WiFi

The goal of Industry 4.0 is to make production more flexible, dynamic and transparent.

technologies are the EtherCAT device protocol and the EtherCAT automation protocol for the horizontal communication between machine controllers in the future enhanced by TSN (time sensitive networking). But if we talk to a non-EtherCAT system, we will also be OPC UA pub/sub or DA but predominately pub/sub, the latest edition to the OPC UA portfolio. Also, OPC is the technology of choice for connectivity. EtherCAT is not just sitting and waiting for those to evolve, we are participating and contributing actively with the OPC committees.”

And how did the event turn out? Very well, according to Australasian managing director Steven Sischy.

“There has been a lot of questions, which is what we wanted,” said Sischy. “A lot of customers who are using the technology may not understand some of the benefits. This event brings these benefits to the foreground.

“It created a platform to engage customers,” he said. “This kind event allows them to see a new application and brings out a new idea and then ask themselves – ‘Could I apply this to my application?’” said Sischy.

Since its inception in 2004, EtherCAT has one distinct advantage over a lot of its competition. Something that is not lost on Sischy.

“One of EtherCAT’s main benefits is that it is still version one and we haven’t changed formats, which is a massive thing,” said Sischy.

“We see with some of our competitors that if they have a second version, then it is not compatible with version one and that poses a problem. Whereas customers who started off in 2004 with EtherCAT there are not such problems. The technology hasn’t changed. Most of the new features are added into the master, not the slave. If it is Beckhoff hardware, all we do is update the firmware on the device. So we have the ability to change it from when it was originally released and bring it right up to date.

“The only thing we have to think about are the EtherCAT slave identifiers, which is a slave definition,” said Sischy. “This tells the master what the device is and this is how to deal with it. There is a description on how to deal with a device, which means the slave description file needs to be updated. For that you can go directly to the EtherCAT website and say that you want to update my device descriptions and manually download the device description and update the file. And then, you are up to date.” PACE

Rostan explained that EtherCAT is the fieldbus that has outstanding real-time capabilities with the OPC UA.

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DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 17

ENERGY EFFICIENCY

Cost-effective grid stabilisation Renewable energy is here to stay but there are technical challenges.

Maren Gast and Hans-Peter Pircher from Phoenix Contact explain why.

F

eeding renewable, and therefore fluctuating, energy into the power grid causes variations in supply voltage and electric load.

The use of an energy storage system for control reserve, as implemented at the campus Garching (Technical University of Munich), can be a solution for stabilisation.

Approximately 30,000 wind turbine generators have been operating in Germany, supplying about 19 per cent of the total power with a power output of 56GW. Also, the number of photovoltaic systems has been increasing to 1.6 million over the past few years.

This source of renewable energy currently covers seven per cent of the energy needed in Germany. In total, renewable energies had a share of almost 39 per cent in 2017’s net power generation. Feeding in these heavily fluctuating energies from

renewable sources results in increasing technical challenges for the German power grid. This is why the supply of green power to the grid is already subject to political regulation.

Under specific circumstances, network operators may limit the power output of renewable energy systems or shut them down completely. With regard to efficiency, limiting the output of wind turbines, photovoltaic and other renewable energy systems is not necessarily the best solution for stabilising the networks. Large battery storage systems are more suitable for the compensation of voltage and load variations in the power grid. At the same time, energy storage systems for control reserve help limit the power distribution infrastructure to a necessary and acceptable extent.

With all this in mind, German energy storage specialist, Smart Power,

deployed the first energy storage solution for control reserve in June 2017 in the area of the Bayernwerke distribution grid operator at the campus Garching of Munich’s Technical University.

The storage system, with a capacity of 1.2 MWh, analyses the grid frequency, automatically detects rising and falling feed-in power values in the grid and immediately initiates automatic adjustment. It is therefore an important solution for the stability of the power grid.

Centralised control by means of one control unit

For effective grid stabilisation, a variety of different parts of the PCR energy storage system need to work optimally together. The components include NEC energy storage devices, Bonfiglioli inverters and a control unit supplied by Phoenix Contact.

Another task is the implementation of connections and communication interfaces to the medium-voltage system, the direct sellers, and finally, to the grid connection point. Centralised control is realised through the control unit. It is a modular small-scale controller from Phoenix Contact’s Inline product family with digital and analogue inputs and outputs.

The modularity and flexibility of the hardware is reflected in the related software. Additionally, the company provides detailed pre-programmed function block libraries in accordance with IEC 61131, the use of which facilitates the communication between the individual system components.

The control unit then performs the essential and complex operations that are detailed below.

The battery energy controller reacts within milliseconds

While traditional power plants need to be operated outside of their optimum operating range, battery storage systems for control reserve are able to react within a few milliseconds to variations in load and voltage. To this effect, the grid is balanced by means of a battery energy controller, i. e., a software running on the Inline controller. The software block was developed by Smart Power on the basis of Phoenix Contact’s PC Worx engineering environment.

Deviations from the mains frequency of 50 Hz must not be larger than 20 mHz. If, for instance, the frequency value is 49.8 Hz, energy is fed into the grid.

However, if the mains frequency exceeds 50.2 Hz, the battery energy controller activates, and the surplus energy is stored in the battery.

Secure data transmission to the direct seller

Regarding the grid, the PCR energy storage system also serves as a decentralised energy generator when energy is being fed into the grid.

18 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

ENERGY EFFICIENCY

“The modularity and flexibility of the hardware is reflected in the related software.�

Therefore, the network parameters need to be recorded at the grid connection point by measuring devices and transmitted to the PGS controller in the central control unit. Then, the actuating values calculated from the different types of reactive power regulators are transmitted to the inverter of the system.

Battery storage systems for control reserve Another task is realising a data are able to react within a few milliseconds connection to the control system of the company in charge of direct marketing.

For the PCR energy storage system at campus Garching, Entelios AG, an the control unit and the direct seller energy and services A D trading _ PAC EA M S Fcompany, E B _ 1 3 . p via d fa VPN P anetwork g e 1connection 9 / 0 1by/ 1 3 , manages the distribution of control means of a secure remote maintenance reserve. The data is exchanged between router, combined with a GPS antenna.

Furthermore, the data can be forwarded via 1 0Modbus/TCP : 0 0 A Mor via the IEC 608705-101 remote control protocol. With that said, Phoenix Contact not only

offers numerous industrial components to the operators, but also provides support in the individual design of each application. PACE

DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 19

INDUSTRIAL SPRAYING

Making the booth fit the job – a new way Chris Emmins knew there was a gap in the spray booth market when automotive booths were being used in industrial settings. He decided to do something about it. Mike Wheeler explains.

T

here are many ways for a business to succeed. Timing might be the key. Maybe there’s a gap in the market.

It could be inventing a new product.

Or, even something as simple as slightly changing the functionality of a product to give it a new dimension.

When it comes to industrial spray booths, Process Finishing Solutions managing director, Chris Emmins, saw some of those things when he decided to launch his own spray booth manufacturing business. But he saw one other important area – he knew he could make a more suitable product than what was being offered to the industry.

Starting out selling automotive paint in the mid-1970s, Emmins began to focus on spray equipment and then spray booths. It was a natural progression for him to move into automated painting systems.

“In those days I was selling other people’s booths and I was having a lot of trouble with them,” he said. “They were Australian-made, and while the manufacturers said they met Australian standards, that didn’t mean they were good quality. They were always breaking down, so there was plenty of work doing maintenance.

“But I hated doing the same repairs to the same booths all the time. I was thinking ‘surely I can improve some of these designs’. I starting building my own and I soon worked out what to do and what not to do. It wasn’t necessarily the cheapest way to go at the time so we didn’t grow as well as we wanted, but I enjoyed the challenge and the learning experience.”

With his long experience and knowledge of selling paint and spray equipment into the industrial market, it was another natural progression to start designing spray booths for 20 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

Different spray booth set ups require different specifications.

industrial applications. It became clear that many process and manufacturing plants had different requirements, which meant booths needed a different range of specifications than a traditional automotive spray booth.

Automotive refinish is a huge market for spray booth suppliers so competition is fierce. But most companies import booths. They are not task specific or comprehensively purpose-built. Businesses are being sold an automotive booth even if it isn’t the best booth for the job.

“What tended to happen was that all the spray booth manufacturers were selling automotive spray booths for industrial applications,” said Emmins.

“But an automotive spray booth is designed to do something different.

We did a job not long ago where a guy was painting wheels and all the booth companies tried to sell him car booths.

It just wasn’t right. We designed a system for the same price that has more than double the output, with lower running costs” A production manager who is

trying to persuade the boss to invest in a spray booth to paint industrial products – especially large quantities – may be thinking, ‘well, a spray booth is a spray booth, right?’ Think again. There are specific criteria that need to be considered – particularly the quantity of paint being used and the booth’s capacity for dealing with

overspray, Emmins explains.

“An automotive booth that is used as it is designed, will go through an average of 10 litres of paint a day, generally resulting in six litres on the job and four litres that needs to be extracted through the filters. Under normal usage, filters should last about three months before then need to be replaced.

“But in a high production shop, it’s more likely the operator is using about 100 litres of paint a day. Again using an automotive booth will result in 40 litres going through the filters.

Instead of changing them every three months, you might have to change them weekly.”

This significant increase in maintenance requirements is costly in terms of not only filter and labour costs, but lost production and delayed through-put.

It’s just one feature that isn’t obvious to many until after the booth has been set up and operating.

“The right industrial booth won’t blow your maintenance budget and dampen your production schedule.

A high-end industrial spray booth can go through about 100 litres of paint a day.

INDUSTRIAL SPRAYING

There can be hidden compliance costs if the wrong type of spray booth is set up in an industrial setting.

Booths with true water-wash systems don’t have filters significantly, reducing maintenance costs,” he said. “The booth can run for six to 12 months– depending on your production – without any changes. Regular housekeeping is still required but there is little downtime maintenance.

“That’s the big difference between buying a typical automotive spray booth and one specifically designed to do an industrial job.”

Emmins said it’s understandable that some companies primarily consider upfront costs when investing in major plant equipment such as a spray booth. But he warns that some low-budget options – especially some imported booths – do not meet Australian standards. And bringing them up to local compliance can be very costly.

“Automotive refinish is a huge market for spray booth suppliers so competition is fierce. ” “We had a situation where a business bought a couple of spray booths from China,” he said. “He paid about $20,000 to $25,000 and it got to inspection stage but he couldn’t get it up and running.

“The gas company was not going to connect the gas and the electricity company was not going to connect the power. It cost him $65,000 to get the modifications needed to meet Australian requirements.”

Emmins said the key element that Process Finishing Solutions offers is customisation.

“We ensure that our booths can

handle the specific volumes required.

We make sure that it sits nicely in the space allocated by the company, and is to the budget specified.

“Recently, we designed a system that fits into a small footprint of a customer’s workshop, and it is fully automated,” he said. “They wanted one to one-and-a-half people to operate it.

“We’ve managed to put in a system that works with one person operating it four hours per day, but giving the same output.

Emmins believes that the high cost of wages in Australia is forcing industry

to automate finishing systems “Manufacturing has been automated for years but the painting side has generally remained manual,” Emmins says.

“I think the cost of robotics is coming down so there will come a point where a well-designed automated system will work out more cost effective.”

“Painting is also a different dynamic. There are a lot of companies that can supply a CNC lathe or laser to cut and fold sheet metal. With painting, it’s not straight forward. We have the ideas and experience now to offer smart solutions for just about any application.

“Every job has to be made to suit the product that is being made. “We have the ability to customise, but keep it simple.” PACE DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 21

INFRASTRUCTURE

Market change leads to rethink on construction needs Total Construction has opened a new category to its expanding portfolio of construction specialities.

Mike Wheeler asks James Bolton and Rob Blythman about the company’s new Infrastructure Division.

W

ith any business, those in the driving seat have to look ahead to the future if they want to expand and/or succeed.

Success can come in many forms, but in the construction industry, with its tight margins and deadlines, it is important to diversify.

Up until recently James Bolton headed the renewable energy side of the business for Total Construction.

However, 12 months ago, he and other senior management realised that while renewables are certainly an expanding market, there were other, similar markets that needed attention.

Thus the Infrastructure Division of the company was born, which will cover waste, water and rail, as well as renewables. Bolton heads up the new division as general manager, and is 22 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

bullish about the future and why the change had to occur.

“It was multifaceted approach,” said Bolton. “We found we were doing some work in these sectors, particularly a lot of work coming from the waste sector. Recycled water-type projects were also coming through.”

“The commercial reality is that we have to go where the work is, to a degree. When we looked at the renewable energy division of Total Construction, we realised there was a lot more going on than just renewables. So that was one part of changing our focus. The other component was some self-reflection and self-realisation that we are not going to go out and build $100 million plus solar farms or 100MW wind farms. That’s something that is outside the scope of Total.”

Total Construction’s business development manager for food and beverage and renewable energy, Rob Blythman, backs up Bolton’s assertion.

“The crux of it is that renewable energy projects are in the marketplace, but they are only at the top end of town at the moment,” said Blythman.

“We came to the realisation within the business that we couldn’t maintain a renewables-only division because those type of projects require a significant investment in costing and planning by the builder, and unfortunately the projects consistently end up going nowhere. James identified correctly that there were more water treatment/waste-type processes and infrastructure-type opportunities out there that became real projects. We couldn’t ignore it.”

So why would someone come to

Total Construction? Both Bolton and Blythman agree that the company has an all-encompassing approach when it comes to mid-level type projects that the company specialises in.

“There are several reasons you would come to us,” said Bolton.

“One is that we have in-house design capability, which not every construction company has. You can come in at the front end and don’t have to get a consultant or spend a lot of money to only end up with some documents to then go to a builder.

You come to us, the builder, at the very inception of the idea and come up with something that is workable.”

And if there are risk-averse Tier One construction companies looking for a sub-contractor to take over part of the project, then Total Construction could be a go-to choice due to another

INFRASTRUCTURE

Sydney and NSW,” said Bolton. “It could be because China is no longer taking as much of our rubbish, or because tipping fees in QLD have gone up. We are finding quite a few waste transfer stations are popping up, where waste is dumped on a slab, sorted out, then repackaged up and sent back out. They also split the waste at what they call a MRF (material recycling facility) where they take out the wood and the paper and this kind of stuff for valuable re-use.”

“One driving force is the tipping fee I mentioned. Currently, it is arguably now more expensive for me to take my truck and its refuse from the kerb and chuck it in a landfill.

It’s a considerable incentive for putting processes in place to avoid sending material to landfill.”

Bolton spells out why it is worthwhile building this infrastructure and why he is expecting more to be constructed over the next decade as the new mindset starts taking shape.

reason – risk deflection. A head contractor on a major project that has all the civil or infrastructure jobs within the development might want to spread the burden of risk around.

If they can find a builder that will take on a certain aspect and there are any issues, it then becomes that sub-contractor’s problem.

While processing engineering is a key factor in how the company operates, within the new division it is going to concentrate a lot on waste and wastewater, with a little bit of rail thrown in. And there are plenty of opportunities out there, especially as China is no longer taking Australian recyclables. Councils, recyclers and interested third parties have to start thinking different.

“Waste is a hot topic and a hot market at the moment, especially in

“The waste company gets paid a certain amount of dollars per tonne to take away the waste,” said Bolton.

“They take it to facility A and they take out the paper and plastic. They then take it to facility B and they compost it and they put that material in an abandoned mine, rather than landfill. Let’s say that compost is at zero value or costs $5 a tonne or whatever, and so then you are left with a very small fraction that goes to the landfill, and the waste company needs to pay a relatively small amount of money to put that in landfill. The difference between what the company gets paid from the Council, the cost to process all that and the avoided the landfill charge, is the profit.”

A final key to the building jigsaw puzzle is early contractor involvement, or ECI, as Bolton and Blythman call it.

“Infrastructure is going to be the biggest cost for the country over the next 10 years,” said Blythman. “Tens

of billions across all the states. We are in a position to take advantage of that pie, but we can’t go for the big ticket projects. Of course, the government will not look at us for that size project.

They want guarantees. However, what we can do is help on smaller projects and if we become involved early we can be a big difference in making sure these projects come in on time and on budget.”

With rail infrastructure increasing over the next decade, Bolton said that this is another area that the company is looking to expand into in the near future and so has appointed a new person, James Hooker, to look after that aspect of the business.

Disposing of waste is an ongoing problem for councils and states alike, which means that a lot more processing plants are going to be needed in the near future. And Total Construction plans on being there when the roll out of these projects start increasing. PACE

Waste is a huge industry that will be expanding exponentially over the next decade.

DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 23

SENSORS

There is a need to have a new and innovative range of sensor technology with increasing customer demands.

Proximity sensors for all requirements The inductive proximity sensor has been at the forefront of factory automation giving reliable switching and feedback on plant and machinery for 50 years. PACE explains.

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he story behind the humble proximity sensor is extraordinary. The initial quest was to find a replacement to the mechanical limit switch that was good for the times but unreliable and prone to breakage and lost production. The inception of the proximity switch – being solid state and non-contact – was a giant leap forward in industrial automation which in reality, should not be overlooked.

Since this time, the growth of the product line from ifm has been big. Body sizes and styles changed depending on a customer’s requirements. There needed to be a new and innovative range of sensors and sensor technology.

They increased in size to get greater sensing ranges in heavy industrial

24 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

environments, such as detection of large carts in brick making, plants for manufacturing of vehicles, harsh mining applications and the list goes on. There were also needs from industry for tiny proximity sensors as small as 3mm in diameter for robotics, CNC, surgical and the like.

But, there were also requirements in harsher industries such as dairies and food and beverage manufacturing.

Extreme wash-down with caustic substances and a high resistance to heat while being hit with the high pressure of a gurney, meant more was required from this sensor than ever before, so more research and development was required. Requests came in from truck manufacturers, trains and rail line switching junctions, tram, plane loaders, mine processing, mine excavators – the

requirements were vast. If there was a need to see a position of a door, vice, rubbish bin flap, public toilet doors – the inductive proximity sensor was there.

The timeline of the proximity sensor is amazing from a cylindrical housing as small as 3mm up to a 164mm in diameter with a 120mm sensing range. There is also a family of rectangular proximity sensors down to new flat pack design for those tight spaces, which has a sensing range of 8mm.

The range of body types are quite extensive. For example, full metal stainless-steel bodies with high wash-down with IP68/69K for all food pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Special sensors for welding applications have been developed, which have a non-stick coating that

is designed for installations around spot welders that throw weld spatter all over the sensor and whatever doesn’t just fall off, can be easily and safely brushed away with a wire brush with no damage to the sensor.

There are also sensors specifically for trucks and the ever-expanding requirements of the mobile vehicle industry. Then there are those made for rubbish trucks, elevated work platforms, mining trucks, excavators, fork lifts, concrete pumpers, bulldozers, public transport such as buses, trains, trams etc. Most of these environments are extreme and need specific design characteristics to survive road conditions, high and low temperatures and humidity. With Australian weather conditions being extreme, ifm sensors must survive and be suitable to the

SENSORS

“The initial quest was to find a replacement to the mechanical limit switch that was good for the times but unreliable and prone to breakage and lost production. The inception of the proximity switch – being solid state and non-contact – was a giant leap forward in industrial automation which in reality, should not be overlooked.”

Special sensors to detect metals at the same range, regardless of the material, were introduced to the market by ifm.

conditions that are presented to them.

There was a new requirement, valve actuator feedback for open and closed positioning due to the constant breakdown of mechanical micro switches. So the dual-head proximity sensor was designed with a large acceptance from all industries that needed this critical information sent back to the control system. Now these sensors have evolved to give 0.1° feedback accuracy to know if the valve is stuck, closes too slowly, or doesn’t close due to a failing seal. Special sensors, (now seen as standard) to detect all metals at the same range no matter if it’s mild steel, stainless steel, brass etc were introduced to the market from ifm.

There are also a few specialist type proximity sensors for use in safety door applications and hazardous area zones that are intrinsically safe.

Kplus sensors, one sensing range for all metals Inductive Kplus sensors have the same sensing range for all metal types. So they are suited for the detection of aluminium where conventional sensors show a reduced sensing range. High switching frequencies allow the monitoring of fast-moving targets

up to 2000Hz. The resistant of a stainless-steel housing is also suited for applications with continuous contact with oils and coolants.

The temperature range, as well as the high protection ratings, allows universal use of the new sensors.

without loss of the data through interference or analogue-to-digital conversion loses. This allowed the user to monitor the process continuously and react to deviations caused by wear over time. The new inductive ifm sensors with IO-Link could be integrated into almost any individual application. Inductive sensors with IO-Link interface measure the distance to the target permanently and transfer it to the controller and the ERP system via the ifm IO-Link master. Now that all this data has been collected, the user could do whatever they want.

Plant and machine efficiencies could be largely improved.

Downtime was slashed and production increased. With the everincreasing competition to a business owner’s product in the market place, these improvements on machine efficiencies and production increases were imperative.

These are some of the most important pieces of the automation puzzle that are often overlooked and at times, ignored. This is why it is important that when looking for sensors you get the right type for the right job. PACE

The new inductive ifm sensors with IO-Link could be integrated into almost any individual application.

Switching technology

Now to the actual switching technology. Initially, the sensor was only designed to switch on and off. There was a higher level of requirement from industry for continuous feedback with an analogue signal that was a leap forward in technology. With an IO-Link-enabled proximity sensor, users could imagine that number of areas where it could be utilised.

One sensor for NO/NC, PNP/ NPN, protection rating of IP 65/ IP 66/IP 67/IP 68 /IP 69K and users could decide where the sensor actually switches within the sensing zone. This allowed for continuous feedback over a known network such as EtherNet/IP, EtherCAT, Profinet and Modbus TCP. The basics of the binary connection of inductive sensors had only been rated for pure switching information, IO-Link could even transfer distance information DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 25

ENERGY MANAGEMENT

Limitations of industrial solar systems and how to overcome them While renewables have been grabbing headlines over the past couple of years, there are some inherent issues surrounding the technology. PACE explains.

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ecent cost reductions in solar technologies, and a changing energy landscape, has seen a wave of industrial businesses install industrial solar PV systems to slash their electricity bills.

As other businesses look to do the same, it will pay to do the research and understand exactly how maximum ROI can be gained from solar. This is because the nature of the sun, the energy market, current technology availability and the way industrial operators are billed, means less can be gained from installing solar panels on their own.

But businesses are seeing solar’s value, for example first movers like Sanjeev Gupta, SA Water CEO Roch Cheroux, and Kingspan CEO Gene Murtagh, have all announced “Net Zero Energy” projects that will harness solar in some way.

These projects have some commonality: they harness energy management systems, storage and often a mix of renewables. Such systems are being called Distributed Energy Resources (DER), and they’re set to power 60 per cent of Australia by 2050.

Here is why solar alone, is not enough.

It is good to research and understand the maximum ROI to be gained from investing in solar.

26 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

Solar is non-dispatchable energy, so is wasted if not stored

While traditional power sources are dispatchable, and can dish out power whenever needed, the sun’s energy is intermittent and without storage, solar can’t supply electricity on demand.

But it does generate considerable energy supply in the day. Increasingly, more solar electricity is being produced than can be consumed.

So, to gain the most from solar, the business, or industrial operation should capture excess energy with storage, or look at demand response activities to

shift loads, or operate when solar is at its peak.

There are three markets that commercial and industrial scale businesses with renewables can operate within, provided they meet certain criteria: • Solar feed-in tariffs • Renewable energy credits • Ancillary market(s)

Solar feed-in tariffs

Historically, solar feed-in tariffs have been influential in getting the residential market on board. But like the residential market, the commercial

ENERGY MANAGEMENT

AEMO says that sophisticated renewable generation like DER systems are enabling more large-scale businesses to join the ancillary markets.

feed-in tariff rate has reduced from a round 40 cents per every kilowatt hour (kWh) sold back to the grid, to just 8c/ kWh with a standard supply rate of 33.91c/kWh and peak rate around the 50c/kWh mark. The financial incentive to sell solar to the grid has vanished.

Renewable energy credits

Accredited commercial, industrial or utility businesses with surplus renewable energy may be able to sell Large-scale Generation Certificates (LGCs) to coal-fired generators or electricity providers who are required to purchase a set amount under the Renewable Energy Target scheme.

Ancillary markets

If an operation can supply the grid with temporary high bursts of power when it’s needed, you may gain from ancillary markets that have typically been set aside for commercial power generators. The sell back rates are attractive. But solar panels alone don’t entitle you to operate in the market. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) sets strict performance parameters and requirements including having a

control system, high-speed data record, high-speed metering, and telemetry protocols to enable communication between an operation and the utility.

AEMO also says that sophisticated renewable generation like DER systems are enabling more large-scale businesses to join the ancillary market.

Entry into the ancillary markets and the LGC market could yield a healthier return than only opting for solar feedin. Entry depends on the size and set up of a solar system. Typically, these markets require users to meet high standards of control systems and data for record keeping and communication with the utility. Plus, the way businesses are billed means they get less bang for their buck. In line with the Australian Energy Market Commission regulations, business and residential customers will (or soon will) pay costreflective tariffs. This means the way a company is billed reflects the ‘“actual demand” a user puts on the grid not their cumulative usage.

The Actual Demand Charge is usually calculated based on the maximum recorded “demand” or usage in the peak and shoulder periods since the last meter read. The “level of

demand” is worked out by how much electricity needed in any one 30-minute interval.

Can solar offset actual demand?

There’s an obvious incentive for businesses to reduce actual demand and level out their load. While solar can offset the amount of grid energy you use, its intermittency can limit the ability to consistently reduce demand.

But control systems and sub metering as part of a DER system can: a) show users which systems and devices consume the most power. b) automatically draw from on-site generation units such as solar, generators or stored energy to offset grid demand.

Solar alone cannot reduce demand charges at all times of the day, and year. Some of the answer lies in having a mix of energy generation types on-site and program them to run during energy intensive processes to “shift loads” and offset grid demand charges.

Standard grid connected solar is designed to disconnect from the grid and stop producing energy when the grid goes down. If it remains ‘on’, it’ll feedback power out to the grid

– which is highly dangerous for any repair or maintenance works required.

Solar won’t necessarily protect the business from grid instability – businesses should protect themselves from downtime risk with a system that can safety isolate itself (called “islanding”) to keep producing backup electricity during disturbances. DERs and microgrids offer such functionality.

While the return on solar isn’t as clear cut as some might think, there’s enormous opportunity for businesses to take advantage of industrial-solar scale energy generation. It will pay to understand exactly how the market, technology and one’s own sub-systems and electricity contract interplay to impact a user’s energy needs.

The nature of the sun’s intermittency, the feed-in schemes and markets, the grid and billing charges, means that in order to gain the most from solar, control systems, data, telemetry and communication systems and/or other renewables and backup systems may be required.

Doing due diligence will help users make the right decisions to secure the businesses’ energy reliability as other companies move into the market. PACE DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 27

INDUSTRY COLLABORATION

The UTS Tech Lab covers 9,000 sqm.

UTS Tech Lab: a new way to bring both industry and academia together Associate Professor Ray Kirby, director, Tech Lab Operations, FEIT, The University of Technology Sydney tells PACE how industry and academia can complement each other.

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he collaboration between industry and academia has been an ongoing topic of debate for decades.

Australia has well-regarded research emerging from different fields but ranks last globally when it comes to businesses collaborating on innovation with higher education or research institutions.

Another report revealed that Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) could increase by $8 billion over the next 10 years, if Australia reached just the OECD average for collaboration between industry and academia.

Meanwhile, the NSW Innovation and Productivity Scorecard released last month noted that, while NSW leads Australia in terms of research collaborations per institute, there is scope to improve collaborative research efforts in NSW and nationally.

The opening of the University of Technology Sydney’s Tech Lab in September is a step in that

28 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

direction. Led by the UTS Faculty of Engineering and Technology, the purpose-built, $65 million facility covers 9,000 sqm in the Sydney suburb of Botany, in close proximity to a major new technology and innovation precinct recently announced by the NSW government.

Tech Lab is a unique research facility in Australia, where academics and researchers from diverse fields work in tandem with industry and government to develop innovative solutions for the world of tomorrow, taking new technologies from early readiness to commercial viability.

The facility is designed to deliberately disrupt traditional university approaches to undertaking research.

Tech Lab seeks to build consortia to work on projects under the Internet of Things (IoT) theme, housed within its diverse laboratories.

Tech Lab aims to work with a wide range of companies, from big to small, including working with startups to continue to build on Australia’s research strengths. It

Tech Lab will work with both big and small enterprises.

INDUSTRY COLLABORATION

Tech Lab has an open plan design for both its lab spaces and activity-based workspaces.

brings industry and academia together to deliver the most technologicallyadvanced products and services. This will provide growth for businesses and jobs for the students and the wider community. Created to nurture collaboration and partnerships with industry and government, Tech Lab features an open plan design, both in its lab spaces and its activitybased workspaces. This encourages collaborative work and interaction between researchers and specialists.

Work and meeting spaces are available so external partners can work alongside UTS researchers.

IoT is a strategic research focus for Tech Lab, linking together the multidisciplinary research strengths within its walls to foster a new capacity for technological impact in countless arenas. The multidisciplinary nature of the facility

strategically links research strengths from numerous areas of engineering and IT. The lab leaders at Tech Lab are experts in their fields, and provide research direction using state-ofthe-art facilities. Tech Lab capabilities span but are not limited to: civil and environmental engineering; mechanical and mechatronic engineering; software, electrical and data engineering; systems; management; and leadership.

Tech Lab will offer R&D projects, consultancy, contract work and short courses. It is equipped with stateof-the-art capabilities that include, among other things: • computational intelligence and brain-computer interface (CIBCI) lab; • multimedia lab; • centre for autonomous systems (CAS) lab;

• centre for electrical machines and power electronics (CEMPE); • photonics; • acoustics lab; • large-scale structural testing facility; • material characterisation and service life performance lab; • geotechnical laboratory; • X-labs; and • laser doppler vibrometry lab.

Partnership is at the heart of Tech Lab’s philosophy and the facility is focusing on creating robust applied research collaborations between academia, industry and government, in spaces where people can meet, generate ideas and make them happen. Spaces are also available for contract and consultancy work, and for external partners to

explore and upskill in new and developing technologies.

Tech Lab has already welcomed organisations such as Sydney Water, which will work with the facility in robotics and smart sensing in pipelines, as well as Nokia, which will run training courses out of the facility. Tech Lab is also in discussion with many other companies interested in working with UTS in the new facility, especially in areas such as smart cities, IoT, and advanced manufacturing.

Tech Lab will not only help Australia draw closer to countries with strong traditional research collaboration cultures, such as Germany, Canada and Singapore, but leapfrog other nations in innovative approaches to skill building and cross- disciplinary problem solving. PACE DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 29

CYBERSECURITY

Experts spill on the best drill for increasing cybersecurity Protecting less and sharing more is the key to staying on top of cybersecurity according to one cyber expert.

Miri Schroeter reports from the Command Control cyber conference in Munich, Germany.

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o stay on top of cybersecurity, companies should start by doing less. This is the advice given by someone who knows the dark world of cyber-attacks and security well. Josh Klein is an expert hacker, a TED talker and the author of several books including Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results.

He explains that doing less entails loosening the reins on security measures.

It’s about sharing information more freely and being open to new technology to reap the benefits of advances, rather than keeping the door closed on emerging opportunities.

“Often I work with companies who decide that their approach to cybersecurity should be to prevent anything from happening,” said Klein.

That includes staying away from vital technological advances. “The problem with this, is that the number-one effect from not engaging with new technology is that you don’t benefit from it.

You might prevent 3D printers from having contact with anyone inside your company, but it doesn’t mean it’s not going to impact your market.

“A purely defensive strategy isn’t working,” said Klein. He identifies

The security of information was a key focus at the Command Control cyber conference in Munich.

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hotels and taxi services as industries that need to get on board with new technology so they don’t fall behind.

Companies such as Airbnb have changed the hospitality sector, taxis are now competing with Uber, and music outlets such as Spotify make for an easy listening experience.

Taking the good with the bad

Technological advances are not slowing down any time soon, so Klein suggests that companies get on board, as the benefits outweigh the negatives. “When we’re talking about technologies, especially new and emerging technologies, the truth is that they’ve got upsides and downsides. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.” He talks about the benefits of CRISPR-Cas9, which enables geneticists and medical researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding or altering sections of the DNA sequence.

“When CRISPR-9 came out, we all knew it would have some positive implications. It’s sort of the gift that keeps on giving. In terms of leading to pre-congenital diseases it’s really proven to be an enormously positive tool.

“It’s also allowing us to do cool new things like letting us launch gene drives.

A gene drive is when you programme an organism to pass on certain traits to 100 per cent of its off spring,” said Klein.

“In New Zealand, they’ve got a problem with mice. There’s too many of them.

They’ve decided to treat it by releasing thousands and thousands of mice that are treated to only have male offspring.”

The results of this could either be that all the mice will be eradicated, or it may not work, or something completely unexpected may happen, said Klein. “If you look at humanity’s track record of going in and using blunt instruments to change eco systems, we haven’t done so hot,” he said.

Sharing information to boost business

“All of our companies have more data than before. Sharing that information is both dangerous and difficult, but it’s worthwhile,” said Klein. “When we start sharing more, we discover markets, we discover new product lines, we discover new relationships and new avenues for our businesses.”

The rise of collaborative models is proving to be effective in businesses, he said. Having subsidiary companies in different countries and being able to see market share information easily and react in real time, is important, said Klein. In a time where companies can easily hire people for certain projects, and employees move from companyto-company to upskill, there is room to grow a business with this strategy in mind, he said.

“CP Insights did a big international study and they found the most effective companies, the most profitable companies, when compared to similar verticals, were all much more likely to buy parent solutions than build.”

In a typical model, companies sink all of their costs into the supply

chain, but that isn’t the best approach, said Klein. He suggests working with the plethora of start-ups available worldwide. “Part of the reason that these partnerships are so effective is that there are so many to choose from.

I suggest that we start sharing what we have. That’s because our growth is contingent on having other parties participate.” But, outsourcing comes with risks. “Most of the criminal activity inside your company, comes from the people that are employed by you. It’s a situation where both strategy and cybersecurity need to be aligned.

“If you’re going to bring people in and out of your organisation more fluidly, it demands a lot more attention to who’s doing what with what.”

Cybersecurity should be available organisation-wide to help control this, said Klein. “The marketing department needs to be talking to the cybersecurity team, but conversely the cybersecurity team needs to be talking to all the other departments.”

Cyber incident simulation

Top management also needs to be more involved in a company’s security processes, said Klein. Dr Marco Gercke, agrees that CEOs and top management cannot afford to take a backbench approach. Gercke, who also spoke at Command Control, is the founder and director of the Cybercrime Research Institute based in Cologne, Germany.

Gercke teaches top management how to deal with cyber-attacks by creating interactive cyber incident simulations.

CEOs need to be prepared in advance, he said. “You cannot tell a CEO to wait until there’s an attack and afterwards it’s going to be much better, because that might have been the only chance they had. We’ve seen CEOs that have lost their job after a cyber-attack.”

Simulations in a realistic environment, such as those used by

CYBERSECURITY

Photo credit: Messe München

Josh Klein, expert hacker and TED talker, shares his thoughts on the increasing importance of cybersecurity to businesses today.

pilots, are good examples of a system that works, he said. “They need to really feel it. You can’t just tell them, ‘Hey, imagine sitting at this desk, imagine you’re in the plane and the engines fail.

What are you going to now’?”

Having a simulation where the pilot can see flashing lights, unwanted noises and an engine that is failing, is what’s going to help them learn, said Gercke.

“You need to get the stress factor because we realise that stress plays an important role.”

He uses activities similar to those used by the military. Putting CEOs in a dark room, with a lot of screens where they are confronted by cyber-attacks will increase their stress levels, which is closer to a real-life situation, said Gercke.

Important decisions such as deciding whether to pay a ransom or negotiating with the hacker, or reporting it to the police, need to be made. One option may seem like the clear winner for a company, but there can be unwanted implications, said Gercke. For instance, calling the police could cause issues for the company.

“It seems that the interest of the police and your interests are aligned as you don’t want people to commit crimes.” But there may be conflict when the company wants to protect itself and the police prioritise catching the criminal by seizing the company’s computers for an investigation, said Gercke. He also suggests in some situations paying a ransom could be the best solution as having a strict no-pay policy can lead to damages that far exceed paying a ransom if the company’s reputation is implicated or people are hurt by the cyber-attack.

When cyber-attacks do physical harm

There was a case where an attack was being carried out on a government computer system, which effected a hospital. People were being harmed because the system vital operations in the hospital were not working properly, said Gercke. “This specific case, turning the Internet of Things (IoT) into an attack vector, not with the focus of being very powerful, but with a focus of maximising harm by attacking a government, is a recent case.

“There are many scenarios you need to prepare for. This is a real challenge for governments, for large enterprises, as well as medium and small enterprises,” said Gercke.

Larry Clinton, president and CEO of the Internet Security Alliance, based in the United States, gave some daunting figures to show the scale of cyber-attack risks. He said that five-million euros are stolen every two minutes through cyber-attacks and 12,000 identities are stolen.

Two-thousand new versions of malware are also created every two minutes.

The figures are likely to rise as economics favour attacks, he said.

“Attacks are cheap, attacks are easy to access, attacks are very profitable.”

Clinton suggests that governments and corporations should work together to improve security measures. Cyberattacks should also be managed, rather than attempting to stop them all together, as stopping them is as impossible as stopping bad weather, said Clinton. PACE

Cyber threats – the greatest worry in modern age CEOs worldwide identify cyber threats as the business risk of greatest concern, a PwC cybersecurity and privacy report indicates.

Senior executives recognise the rising stakes of cyber insecurity. This is proven to be at the forefront of their minds as 87 per cent of global CEOs say they are investing in cybersecurity to build trust with customers. Nearly as many, 81 per cent, say they are creating transparency in the usage and storage of data.

PwC breaks this down to show which areas of the world have the most CEOs that claim to be building trust with customers by investing in cybersecurity to a large extent. Australia sits in the middle, with room for more CEOs to invest in cybersecurity.

Despite growth in cybersecurity investments, the 2018 Global State of Information Security Survey found that only about half of respondents have put key measures in place. In the report, PwC’s US cybersecurity and privacy leader, Sean Joyce, said there are very few companies that are building cyber and privacy risk management into their digital transformation correctly. “The winners of the future are going to be the ones that from the design phase all the way to production build in that risk management – it’s a brand-defining opportunity,” he said.

About two-thirds of respondents to the PwC survey worldwide said their

organisation put a chief privacy officer, or similar executive, in charge of privacy.

This is most common among larger organisations. For institutions worth $10 billion or more, at least 79 per cent of respondents say their organisation has such an executive in place. For organisations worth between $15b and $25b, it is 81 per cent.

No matter the size of a business, there are measures that can be introduced to improve security. PwC suggests that CEOs lead and don’t simply delegate data protection and privacy issues to others who are not fully responsible for driving the business and setting the risk appetite. To support CEO decisionmaking, the chief privacy officer should have a seat at the table. Boards as a whole – not merely individual directors – should gain continuous knowledge of security matters.

Data use and security knowledge should be taken as a positive step towards business growth. According to PwC, companies should use data in more innovative ways to open the door to more opportunities. But with this comes increased risk, so businesses should balance data use with strong protection and detection controls.

Understanding the most common risks, including lack of awareness about data collection and retention activities, is a starting point for developing a data-use governance framework.

Locations with most CEOs claiming to build trust with customers by investing in cybersecurity 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

62

52

47

46

43

43

pe rica ast erica and Euro a Pacific Ame e tral dle E h Am estern Asi Mid Cen Europ Latin Nort W n r e East

38

0%

a Afric

DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 31

DRIVES

Movigear Classic size 1 has high overload capacity SEW Eurodrive’s Movigear Classic size 1 drive unit can improve efficiencies and drive down the cost of ownership due to its array of features that it has packed into its casing. PACE explains.

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s the first component of the new decentralised product portfolio from the Movi-C modular automation system, the Movigear Classic size 1 is a compact and highly energy efficient mechatronic drive unit. Comprising of an IE4 super-premium efficiency permanent magnet motor closely coupled to highly optimised helical gearing mounted in lightweight aluminium housing, it is designed for applications in the torque range between 10 and 100Nm. Weighing only 8kg and occupying a small installation space the all new size 1 will initially be available for control via external control electronics; in conjunction with the Movigear LT frequency inverter range or Movi-C automation modular controller.

An addition to the successful Movigear size 2 and 4, rated for torque classes ranging from 200Nm

The Movigear Classic 1 weighs only 8kg.

to 400Nm respectively, the release of a smaller Movigear enhances the Movigear product family. The availability of three physical sizes having a constant torque throughout a wide speed range, high overload

capability, a selection of multiple shaft sizes coupled with an optimised project planning process, can lead to a reduction of unit variants required for an installation. As a result the plant operator can achieve a substantial

The Movigear Classic 1 is ideal for production lines in the food and beverage industry.

32 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

“Plant operators can optimise their processes and create savings – in things such as energy, space, cleaning, maintenance and inventory, resulting in a lower cost of ownership.” downsizing in inventory.

The size 1’s optimised, totally smooth surfaces and inherent fanless design make it a suitable option for system installers and manufacturers working within strict hygiene standards of the pharmaceutical, food and beverage industries.

The fanless design not only eliminates motor noise but also ensures no swirling of air, dirt and particles, ensuring minimisation of bacteria spread in clean – room installations.

Optimised for conveying applications aimed at various industries, the Movigear Classic range provides the possibility of up to 50 per cent energy saving compared to traditional solutions.

Plant operators can optimise their processes and create savings – in energy, space, cleaning, maintenance and inventory, resulting in a lower cost of ownership.

The Movigear size 1 is the first mechatronics component of the evolving Movi-C modular automation portfolio. Further mechatronic drive components and automation drive controllers will progressively expand the portfolio throughout 2019 and beyond. PACE

B E F EA TURED IN

Do your products and services help manufacturers achieve the best productivity, downtime and efficiency? With manufacturing plants needing to work quicker and more accurately than ever to achieve the best results possible in a fast-paced environment, they need quality products and services to help them. In order to increase productivity and efficiency manufacturers need to reduce costs and downtime – particularly in rapidly growing industries such as pharmaceuticals.

With GlobalData predicting that Australia’s pharmaceutical market is set to rise from more than $22.85 billion in 2016 to $25.2 billion by 2020, now is the best time to promote your company’s involvement in the industry. In the February/March issue of PACE we will profile companies offering solutions that will help grow the sector.

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN TAKING PART IN THE NEXT EDITION OF PACE, contact Ashwin Shekar at Ashwin.shekar@primecreative.com.au or 02 9439 7227

Engineering tips for the next generation of leaders Professor in Environmental Engineering, Julia Lamborn, gives advice on teaching and how keeping to the basics helps you come out on top. Miri Schroeter writes.

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ulia Lamborn teaches environmental engineering and the need to keep a strong human element at the forefront of all work. While there are many technical aspects to be learned in waste management, construction, modelling and all other sectors within engineering, she emphasises one tried and tested skill that remains equally as important – communication.

In a world where people are engaged with technology almost 24/7, some skills are pushed to the back, but Lamborn said communication is something she teaches all of her undergraduate engineering students, so they become well placed to deal with real-life situations.

“You need to really communicate well with people,” she said. Many projects affect the entire community so conversations with the public

are important, said Lamborn. “If a company is creating a new waste facility, for example, there needs to be a lot of community engagement.

Often it’s these sort of facilities that everyone needs.”

Steps to success

With decades of experience in environmental engineering, both from an industry and academic perspective, Lamborn is well placed to give students a real insight into what they can expect. Her expertise includes landfill degradation behaviour, landfill engineering, waste management and environmental impact assessment.

Lamborn is a civil, chemical and environmental engineer. She received a Bachelor’s of Civil Engineering, Graduate Diploma in Chemical Engineering, Master’s in

Environmental Engineering and PhD in environmental engineering, from Swinburne University of Technology.

Her PhD thesis was on landfill gas modelling. Lamborn was employed by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria for 10 years as the cooling tower thermal design engineer.

With a father who was a passionate engineer, Lamborn decided to follow in his footsteps along with three of her four siblings. “My father was an engineer and an academic at Melbourne University. He taught me that engineers solve real problems. That seemed to me to be something really interesting. My father showed me how fun it was,” said Lamborn.

In 1990 she began her academic career. From starting off with parttime work at Swinburne University, Lamborn now rarely sees a week

Julia Lamborn spent 10 years as a cooling tower thermal design engineer for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. where she works less than 50 to 60 hours. But she enjoys her job and plans to continue along the academic track. “I love my current role. I have the ability to really impact change, to assist staff and students in their teaching and learning.”

Lamborn, who has been recognised in her field of environmental engineering, was a finalist in the 2018 Women in Industry Awards for the Excellence in Engineering category.

The award recognises an individual who has shown leadership in engineering, technological excellence and innovation. In 2008, Lamborn won Swinburne University’s Vice Chancellor’s Sustainability award and in 2007 she won the Swinburne University’s Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Award.

Advice for future engineers Careers in environmental engineering include working in design within the mining sector.

34 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

When Lamborn was studying in the 1970s she was an active member of committees and she said that is still a valuable way to get ahead. “I first started being on committees at Engineers Australia when I was a

student because I had a really good mentor who said this is a good way to make connections. It opened so many doors to so many opportunities,” said Lamborn.

She was one of two elected Engineers Australia representatives on the International Engineering Alliance from 2014-2017, she is currently a member of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education, the International Waste Working Group, the Waste Management Association of Australia and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, to name a few.

Working in a sector that is forever changing, this again highlights the importance of communication and engagement, she said. “There’s always new challenges that come along.

It’s about learning how to tackle a bunch of problems that don’t even exist yet. We have to give students a strong grounding in fundamentals and real orientation so they can apply that to situations that haven’t happened yet.”

People also need to learn to approach waste management and environmental changes from a longterm perspective and engineers should be able to help convey the importance of this, she said. People often think short-term as many election promises are made within short time frames, said Lamborn. “It’s actually a much longer horizon,” she said.

Public engagement is vital when undergoing projects for the community.

Engineering students must learn how to communicate well, Lamborn explains.

“Often what I’ll do is use case studies. I give them a lot of examples because I had 10 years in the industry before I joined the academic life.” A proposed hazardous waste facility in Nowingi, Victoria, is one case study she uses to show that students need to think long-term and consider public engagement.

“They picked a site that was sandwiched between two national parks with endangered species in them and it was too far from the waste generators. You start to step the students through what the things are that they are trying to solve and how to go about dealing with something like this,” said Lamborn.

“It’s about critical thinking, but also about students needing to understand it doesn’t matter how technically good your design is, as there are other aspects that have to come into play such as community engagement.

“That’s something that students find hard to understand. It’s not just about making a product. They often don’t see that as important when they are undergraduates,” said Lamborn.

Lamborn’s teaching reaches far beyond Australia as she travels several times a year to teach other engineers about environment, waste management and engineering education. She travelled to France in early October for work and she runs training courses with the Sri Lanka Institution of Engineers.

“There’s always new challenges that come along.

It’s about learning how to tackle a bunch of problems that don’t even exist yet.

We have to give students a strong grounding in fundamentals and real orientation so they can apply that to situations that haven’t happened yet.”

There are so many options for students coming out with an environmentally focused engineering degree, she said. The options include improving laws and regulations, working in design within the construction sector or on landfills, and coordinating the activities of specialist groups such as biologists or ecologists. PACE DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 35

NEW PRODUCTS

Sintrones’ ABOX-5200 fanless box PC debuts Backplane Systems Technology has introduced Sintrones’ ABOX5200 fanless box computer.

The new fanless box computer is designed for a variety of demanding environments and applications in surveillance and field control systems. With the outstanding performance of new Intel Coffee Lake 8th Gen technology, the ABOX-5200 can effectively support autonomous vehicles, factory automation, and license plate recognition.

With high performance and cost-effective benefits, ABOX-5200 offers the best solution for customers and can be adapted to various industrial requirements, including—but not limited to—smart solutions (Smart Patrol, Smart Factory Automation Control System), surveillance systems (Bus Surveillance Fleet Management, Outdoor Video Surveillance Systems), and visual management (Police Car Automatic License Plate Recognition, Vision Control Systems).

It is powered by an Intel 8th gen core i7/i5/i3 CPU with 10x GbE/3x COM/3x DP/4x USB 3.0/9-48V AI GPU Computing. It can provide high computing performance for graphics processing by harnessing the power of its GPU. The ABOX-5200 was engineered using dual hot swappable SATA Storage RAID 0,1,5.

This new fanless box computer can continuously process deep learning AI operations and support end-to-end deep learning solutions which play a vital role for automation solutions and autonomous vehicles. The principle is to focus the high performance on processing numerous data-streams in and from sensors, including cameras and radars. ABOX-5200 computing technology is a perfect fit for connected smart patrol, smart factories, police cars, automatic license plate recognition, and artificial intelligence.

Key features: • Intel coffee lake 8th-Gen hexa-core i7/i5/i3 CPU • 10xGB Ethernet (optional for 8x PoE) • 8x GPI, 4x GPO and 3x RS-232/422/485 • 3x display ports: max resolution 4096x2304@60Hz • Dual hot swappable SATA storage RAID 0,1,5 • 9-48V DC input and wide operating temperature: -40-70°C • Supports LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS • TPM 2.0

Robust mass flow meters and controllers for gases MASS-Stream instruments operate on the basis of direct throughflow measurement in accordance with the constant temperature anemometer principle. They contain no moving parts and the measured gases pass the two stainless-steel sensor probes directly, without bypass. As a result, the gases are unhindered on their flow path, making the series suitable for applications with low pressure loss, as well as less sensitive to moisture and particulate contamination than thermal mass-flow instruments with a bypass sensor. The electronics casing has a robust design with an IP65 level of protection (dustproof and splash waterproof). The mass flow meters and controllers can be supplied with an optional integrated multifunctional display. On the new D-6390 model, the maximum measuring range has been expanded to 10,000 ln/min air equivalent.

Analogue I/O signals as well as an RS232 interface are provided by default. In addition, an interface with DeviceNet, ProfiBUS DP, Modbus or Flow-BUS protocols can be integrated. Typical applications include gas consumption measurements, aeration and purging processes or natural gas/biogas applications.

AMS Instrumentation & Calibration 03 9017 8225 www.ams.ic.com.au

36 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

Backplane Systems (02) 9457 6411 www.backplane.com.au

NEW PRODUCTS

Flexible screw conveyor quick-ship programme XXX xxx Flexible screw conveyors in popular sizes are now available for shipment Xxx in two-to-five days as ready-to-assemble packages with Flexicon’s QuickShip programme, the company announced.

Conveyor tubes and screws offered through the programme are supplied in any length from 3 to 12 m, in diameters from 67 to 115 mm OD. Also included as standard are a stainless steel floor hopper, 45 or 90 degree discharge adapter, TEFC or wash-down duty motor, and waterresistant control panel.

All product contact surfaces are of stainless steel with the exception of the polymer conveyor tube. Non-product contact surfaces are of carbon steel construction with durable industrial finish.

Stainless-steel screws are supplied in a range of geometries matched to the material being conveyed.

Options include a hopper flow promotion device, hopper cover with unflanged inlet port, hopper screen and low-level sensor.

The conveyors can transport a broad range of bulk materials from large pellets to sub-micron powders, including friable products, abrasives and materials prone to pack, cake, bind or smear, with no separation of blends.

Depending on screw geometry selected, material can be conveyed at any angle from horizontal to vertical, in a straight or curved path, through small holes in walls or ceilings.

The screw is driven beyond the point at which material exits the discharge housing, preventing material contact with seals and related issues of bearing failure and product contamination.

The inner screw can be removed through a lower end cap for wash down and inspection, and the conveyor tube flushed with water, steam or cleaning solution.

Flexicon 1300 Flexicon www.flexicon.com.au

ICP DAS’ new IIoT cloud UA-series products ICP Electronics Australia has introduced ICP DAS’ New IIoT Cloud UA Series UA-5231M-4GE and UA-5231M-4GC Industrial IoT Servers.

The UA-5200 is a series of IIoT (Industrial IoT) communications servers, now with the latest UA-5231M-4GE and UA-5231M-4GC, which have metal cases and can support 4G LTE in a multitude of countries including Australia.

The built-in OPC UA Server, MQTT Broker and Client functions meet the requirements of connecting MES, ERP, SCADA, and Cloud services. The UA series can access I/O modules and controllers in the field via communication interfaces such as Ethernet, RS-232, and RS-485, or through protocols like Modbus TCP/RTU/ASCII. UA-5200 Series products support the Cloud service platform “IFTTT”, able to connect with over 500 web apps.

The logic control “If This Then That” allows users to receive firsthand notification messages through the most commonly used mobile apps when an event is triggered. The UA series also connects IT to OT and integrates all the devices as well as web-based apps into the Cloud, allowing managers to improve production performance and enhance their factory competitiveness for Industrial IoT. Key features are: • Built-in OPC UA server, the new industrial communication Standard: connect IT to OT for integrating devices to the cloud to achieve crossplatform monitoring.

• Built-In MQTT Service: active IoT transmission technology able to accelerate data exchange and make efficient use of network resources.

• Supports Logic Control IFTTT for devices connecting to over 500 web-based apps and transmitting alarm notifications to LINE, Facebook, Twitter, Calendar, Mail, and Sina Weibo, etc.

• Provides Function Wizard Web UI for easy step-by-step setup. The “step-box” function helps users to create new projects and can upload or execute these right away.

• Supports IoT cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS,

and IBM Bluemix. By real-time uploading I/O data information, it can get full analyses and reports in order to complete big data.

ICP (02) 9457 6444 www.icp-australia.com.au

DEC 2018/JAN 2019 www.pacetoday.com.au 37

NEW PRODUCTS

Switches help ease transition to digitisation Signal transmission solution specialist for mission-critical applications, Belden, has outlined how it can support customers’ drive to build tomorrow’s network in today’s applications as digitisation takes hold on the industrial landscape. One key aspect is a step-by-step approach move into digitalisation. These include: • future-proof cables; • making all sensor data available and visible; • ensuring a network can deal with the volume of traffic; and • building a single and secure automation network.

Hirschmann Bobcat switch for the next-generation network This next generation compact managed switch is the first appliance to provide advanced security and real-time communication through time-sensitive networking (TSN) technology on all of its ports to standardise Ethernet usage in any application.

Hirschmann Dragon PTN (Packet Transport Network) This is a new MPLS-TP based backbone switch family that has best-in-class HiProvision software, to reliably and efficiently transport mission-critical data, guaranteeing bandwidth in wide area networks.

Dragon PTN and HiProvision deliver a fully integrated Ethernetbased backbone transmission system that ensures uninterrupted communication.

and configurations to accommodate a variety of data transfer requirements. Built on PoE+ generated from the standard 24 V power supply, these unmanaged switches support more devices on the network without requiring an external power device.

Lumberg automation LioN-Power IO-link system expands Lumberg Automation has added two additional I/O hub variants to its range of lion-power IO-link system multiprotocol IO-link masters and I/O hubs, the first standardised I/O technology for communicating with sensors and actuators. 10DI 6DO with 10 digital inputs and six digital outputs and 16DIO with 16 digital inputs/outputs (universal usable) both feature IO-Link V1.1.2 specification and port type 16 DIO a Class A, so they can be connected easily to all IO-link Masters.

Belden also knows industrial IT and delivers the next generation of industrial networking solutions, including wired, wireless and embedded products. With its brands – Hirschmann, GarrettCom and Tofino Security – Belden helps companies minimise downtime and take advantage of the real-time data access and control made possible by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

Belden 1800 500 775 www.belden.com

Hirschmann Dragon MACH4500 layer 3 backbone family This next generation Layer 3 Ethernet backbone is best suited for applications that require high bandwidths and reliable data transfer.

A flexible future-oriented solution, it supports redundant internal power supplies to increase device availability, and low-cost future expansion is easy.

Hirschmann Spider III PoE standard line switches The Spider III PoE Standard Line of entry-level rail switches meets diverse industrial network needs with flexible port options

Gear units designed for long working life Nord Drivesystems has launched a high-performance, washdownoptimised aluminium drive for hygienic applications. This successful series now offers smaller gear units for torques up to 50 Nm as an efficient alternative to worm gear units. The SK 9x0072.1 series has a power range from 0.12 to 1.1 kW and covers speed ratios from 3.03 to 47.67 : 1.

The two-stage helical bevel gear units are characterised by high efficiencies, compact design, reliability and long working life. The highstrength aluminium housing guarantees high rigidity and maximum durability with low weight. Additionally, the modular design provides wide application flexibility due to numerous application and mounting options.

There are two models available: SK 920072.1 and SK 930072.1. The open housing of SK 920072.1 is lightweight and solid due to its construction. It is also available with a universal foot flange.

With its closed housing, the SK 930072.1 is suitable for applications with stringent requirements for hygiene and cleanliness. Additional protection is provided by the optionally available nsd tupH surface treatment.

The standard version is equipped with a B14 flange. All versions are available with solid or hollow shafts. The motor can be mounted directly without a coupling or adapter (IEC or NEMA). Accessories including torque arms, flanges, covers and fastening elements from the Universal series may also be used for this gear unit. The new, compact and flexible Nordbloc.1 bevel gear units are particularly suited for intralogistics and packaging technology, and thanks to their washdown design may also be advantageous for the food and beverage industry.

The LogiDrive combines these new Nordbloc.1 gear units with an energyefficient IE4 synchronous motor and the Nordac Link field distributor for

38 www.pacetoday.com.au DEC 2018/JAN 2019

an optimally matched drive system. These standardised geared motor variants are highly efficient, and thanks to plug and play technology they are maintenance-friendly and benefit from a reduction of spare part stocks, which also results in the reduction of versions.

NORD Drivesystems (03) 9394 0500 www.nord.com/cms/en/home-au.jsp

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